A Season at Pemberley (The Longbourn & Pemberley Variations #3)

Elizabeth Bennet did not intend to fall in love with a house.

She intended a tour. Derbyshire in summer, her aunt and uncle in good spirits, an afternoon spent admiring someone else’s good fortune before moving on to the next inn, the next view, the next thing to be politely impressed by. Pemberley was simply the grandest house on the itinerary.

Then the housekeeper would not stop praising him.

Then she stood in front of his portrait longer than she meant to.

Then he appeared on the lawn, unannounced and unguarded, and asked her aunt and uncle to stay the week.

She refused him once. At Hunsford, with considerable conviction, and very little doubt that she was right to do it.She did not expect to spend a fortnight in his house, watching him be patient with a gardener, generous with her uncle, and tender with a sister she did not know he had.She did not expect to like the man underneath the one she’d been so certain she understood.

Mr. Darcy is hosting a house party. It was meant to be simple — a handful of friends, a few quiet weeks. It becomes considerably less simple the moment Elizabeth Bennet is standing in his hall with nowhere else to be.

There is a sister who has been guarding a wound for two years, and finally finds someone she trusts enough to set it down.There is a woman who belongs effortlessly in his world, and a comparison Elizabeth never asked to make and cannot stop making anyway.There is a letter from home that turns an ordinary morning into a quiet emergency, and a man who once chose privacy over protection and is no longer willing to make that choice twice.

What follows is not a second proposal. It is something slower and considerably more dangerous to her composure: three weeks of proximity, of small unguarded moments, of a man who stops managing his own face around her and a woman who stops pretending indifference is still the truth.